Except in my case instead of the Net, I had a very understanding local library which gave me adult tickets before I was ten - and closed-shelf access not long after.(I should point out that I am an old fart of 43 living in the UK. I shudder to think what would happen to an American librarian today offering such largesse.)

Here's a big question - do you think 'being weird' is nature, nurture or some unholy mix of both?

For me it was both. I was certainly something of a mutant (overly-smart, highly imaginative child in lower-working-class 1970's England) and I believe the free access to new ideas let me stay alive (as in not suiciding) and sane until adulthood.

I'd also put some blame onto Robert Anton Wilson - for all his flaws, his writings (I read Illuminatus/Cosmic Trigger in my early teens) introduced me to the multi-model approach, which gave me a framework to deal with my oddness and my sense of disconnect from the 'real' world I was born into.

The whole weird VS. interesting debate is one I've gone over a number of times with my weird (and very interesting) friends. I think the crux of it is, and this is just subjective, you can be weird without being interesting, but you can't be interesting without being at least a little weird.

Lets take the stereotypical "cat lady". She's seventy. She lives with 14 cats. She actually happened to be my neighbor a couple of years ago, and I sat down to talk to her. You know what she told me? Everything I never wanted to know about how Mittens was fighting with Fluffy. Now that lady was weird, but she was not the slightest bit interesting.

Flip that over, lets take the interesting girl. Always reading, always thinking, turning ideas over in her head. If you can sit down with her and she's willing to hash out some of what she's thinking about with you, sooner or later she's going to try to express a very interesting idea that's only half formed, and it's going to sound weird as all hell. Talk to her a day or two later, and that idea is going to make perfect sense, but you'll always be left with that impression of the moment you turned to her and thought, "What the fuck did you just say?"

Now obviously I'm pulling a few over-simplified examples here, but you can see what I'm getting at?

@Cat Vincent,

I'm with you for the "both". The ability has to be there, of course, but someone has to point you in the right direction. Or, in my case, shove you away in the right direction.

I think being in a hospital and seeing an old man covered in blood giving his last gasp of breath when I was about eight would have been a moment. And as far back as I can remember I've always hated seeing heroes save the day and beat the crap out of the villain. I wanted to see what the world would be like if the villain won.

Redwynd: I see exactly what you are saying, I really can't think of any exposure that will point to a cause. I do remember as a child attempting to play with all my toys equally in case one of them got jealous, though I would put that in the category of an effect, and it could just be misdirected stumbling empathy, or some serious psychological problem that will rear its head in my later years.

My Work Here Is Done. Or at least started. As for seeing what it'd be like if the villain won; I love the Elric of Melnibone books. Best antihero ever.

@Cat VincentI also got access to adult books etc at 9 or 10. This was only about 10 years ago. So librarians could get away with it at least then. And Weirdness is certainly both nature and nurture. Mundanes can see all we do and it just slides off, without that basic drive to be interesting.

@Vespers and Cat VincentI'm Changing my bit, now that I think a little more, because there is a third force. Where is choice in all this? Yeah, genetics is going to set us up, and someone will give the "push". But like murder, like rape, like invention and art, something along the line has to spring from a choice.

'Cause I don't know about the rest of you, but I refuse to be predetermined by Daddy's dick or Mum's Mommy Issues.

@RedwyndI just include that choice to be weird in the 'nature' part. By nature I don't mean genetics or whatever, I just think of it as, well, who you are. And part of who you are is obviously that choice to accept the weird and wonderful parts of the world and not let them slide off like far too many people do.

Hmmm.....I can see where you're coming from on that, but I prefer to give choice it's own category. There's a lot of things in my nature that I didn't choose, and certainly didn't get from anyone around me, but they're still there. There are also things that I have chosen, and am consciously working into my everyday persona.

Going to curve-ball this a little, but the question of choice is going to be the litmus test of A.I., and of citizenship in highly over-populated nations. They have what they are born with (programmed), what they have learned (data input), but they aren't truly "intelligent" until they learn to synthesize the data they have collected and be able to produce original thoughts. And the same goes for people; it has long been my contention that so-called "people" are really just sub-par pretenders. If they are purely reactionary, without at least trying to think their own thoughts, can they really be considered a "person"?

And then there's the question of how to design the test, but that's an implementation issue. Implementation is always flawed.

Hrmm...I have a feeling that my mother reading Kubla Khan to me numerous times while I was a fetus helped spur the weird.Apparently it was my favourite.And various things. Like discovering that teachers do not like being corrected by a five-year-old. And opting to work in a mortuary as a holiday job when fourteen. Listening to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast non-stop for a week at age seven. Lots of self-imposed isolation. No television until I was about eight, which was just dandy. Being kicked out of Brownies on my first day (my first personal experience of an overtly fascist regime). Paralytic fear of E.T. that still exists. Reading lots. Being constantly shunted between a neurotic writer and a depressed mathematical genius. And so on.

Experience has made me weird. Distrusting everybody and their terrible, deluded opinion. Learning to wade through the banal, sifting through the crap, finding what's good and distancing myself from what is bad. Many of my coworkers think I'm weird because I'm much smarter than them.

@RedwyndAs you're talking to me and I started the thread, it's all my fault if it curves anyway.

And. yes. Once one thinks about it, one would give choice it's own category. I agree, there are things in my nature also that I'm trying damned hard to eradicate, and things that I'm trying damned hard to integrate into my nature. So perhaps choice is a necessary, herm, say, not exactly a third category, but a control mechanism on one's nature?

Which fits with that A.I. thing. If one hasn't got control over one's nature, if it's all external input... is one really alive? Nah.

Edit: @ John Smith: Isn't it sad that having the intelligence to learn new things and caring to use it is seen as weird now?

I was bored with the idiots in my year. I met my crazy friends in the last few years of my high school, they were a year below me. Smoking weed and listening to System of a Down's first album all the time probably had something to do with it. The friends probably much more so. I miss those people. Most live in Adelaide now. I'm in Mildura